The Rich Are Different (79 page)

‘Hullo,’ he said when he had no choice but to acknowledge my presence. ‘How are you?’

‘Fine.’

We shook hands limply. I had bribed my way to a spot inside the customs area, and I saw him glance beyond the barrier for some sign of his family. ‘Isn’t Caroline here?’

‘No, I’m afraid not. She—’

‘My brothers?’

‘Your brothers,’ I said, ‘are lying low in a cottage on the New Jersey shore, but we can discuss them later. Steve, before we go beyond the barrier and get involved with the press, there’s something you should know about Caroline. I’m afraid it’s bad news.’

He looked blank. ‘She’s ill again?’

‘She died this morning, Steve. I’m sorry.’

I saw him flinch. ‘Oh God.’ His shoulders slumped. He bent his head and put one hand to the back of his neck as if the source of his pain were located there. ‘But I didn’t think … surely she can’t be … I thought she was getting better.’ He was dazed. ‘She
was
getting better!’ he said fiercely.

‘Well, I guess
you never quite know with cancer.’ Watching him I saw the guilt, grief, misery and shame chase one another across his heavy features until his face was impassive again. ‘I’d have come home earlier,’ he mumbled at last, ‘if I’d thought she was dying.’

I remained politely silent. His secretary announced the baggage had been cleared and was waiting in the hired limousine outside, but when Steve made no response it was I who gave the man his instructions. ‘You and the valet ride in the limousine,’ I said. ‘Mr Sullivan will travel with me.’

We went outside. The press howled around us, and my chief aide had to bawl three times at the top of his voice: ‘Neither Mr Sullivan nor Mr Van Zale has any comment to make about the market at this time!’ When my bodyguard was obliged to bare his teeth at a couple of reporters who seemed intent on making me loathe the press, I felt I had no choice but to exclaim in a scandalized voice: ‘Gentlemen, please! Mr Sullivan has just lost his wife! Have you no decent Christian sympathy for a bereaved man?’ And muttering to my aide to disclose the full details of Caroline’s death I pushed Steve ahead of me into the Cadillac and dived in after him. My bodyguard leapt in the front, the chauffeur touched the accelerator and the press were left seething at the kerb.

Mopping the sweat from my forehead I noted the furore had made little impression on Steve. His next words revealed he was still thinking of his family. ‘My kids,’ he said. ‘I’ve got to go to my kids. Where are they? Who’s looking after them?’

‘My sister. She’s been staying at your home.’

‘Your
sister
? Emily?’

I explained how Emily had volunteered for the part of the Good Samaritan.

‘That’s very kind of her.’ He still sounded dazed. ‘Very kind.’

‘Now about your brothers—’

‘Give me a few minutes, would you?’

I gave him five. He found a cigarette, lit it and pulled out his silver hipflask. After he had taken several gulps of liquor and smoked his cigarette to the butt he squared his shoulders and looked me straight in the eyes. ‘All right. How bad is it?’

I checked the glass partition to make sure it was securely closed but still took the precaution of lowering my voice. ‘That’s for you to decide. Luke wanted two million to set himself straight, but the loans amounted to about a million and a half – Lewis consolidated them and got a twenty-eight-day extension last week. That means you now have twenty-one days to clear up the mess. When you have a plan for fixing it, let us know. Let me stress on behalf of all the partners that we have no knowledge of any criminal activity, only of gross mismanagement.’

‘You realize, of course, that once one partner has guilty knowledge it can be imputed to all the others?’

‘Just fix it, Steve. That’s all we ask. Just fix it.’

‘Sure,’ he said
wearily. ‘I’ll work something out. What I can’t understand is why Caroline didn’t realize the boys were in such deep trouble. I told her to keep an eye on them for me and she was smart enough to have realized what they were up to.’

‘She was in it with them, Steve.’

‘What!’ I had shaken him out of his exhaustion. He was staring at me with shocked disbelief. ‘That can’t be true – I don’t believe it!’

‘Matt told me. He said Caroline wanted to pay you back for your … activities in London and Norfolk. It seems she was very angry that you’d developed quite such an obtrusive friendship with Miss Slade.’

‘Don’t mention that woman’s name to me!’ he yelled, and attacked the liquor in his hip-flask as if it were root beer.

My mouth dropped open. The car had crossed the bridge into Queens and was purring smoothly through the ugly Long Island suburbs. It was raining. I had just managed to clamp my mouth shut again when he said morosely: ‘That’s all finished. We’re through.’

‘But I thought …’ I was incoherent. Surely this was the last thing Dinah Slade could have wanted. ‘I thought you were going to marry her,’ I stammered. ‘I’d heard – Hal Beecher heard recently from his London friends—’

‘Yes, she’s pregnant,’ he said, almost in tears as he emptied his flask. ‘She’s having twins.’

‘Twins!’ Somehow that was very offensive. An illegitimate child is merely unfortunate but illegitimate twins are positively vulgar.

‘Poor little bastards, and I’ll never see them, never!’ he muttered, wallowing in sentimentality. Then suddenly his mood changed as fury elbowed his maudlin streak aside. ‘Paul had a lucky escape from that woman,’ he said bitterly. ‘When I think of all the lies she told me, the way she deceived me about her true feelings—’

It occurred to me he was talking like a man whose pride had suffered a peculiarly painful injury. I decided that Dinah Slade must have made some bad mistake and the thought cheered me. Maybe she wasn’t as clever as I’d always feared she was.

‘You mean she had some ulterior motive in seeking an affair with you?’ I said guilelessly, sure that Miss Slade had been chasing a slice of Van Zale’s for her son since he had been conceived. ‘But what could she have possibly wanted?’

He looked at me with his hurt bloodshot eyes. ‘The bank,’ he said.

I saw he was so upset that he was unable to express himself properly. ‘You mean she wanted the bank for her little boy,’ I said patiently, ‘and she figured the best way to get it was to be married to a partner.’

‘Forget the kid. Forget the marriage. She wants the bank. Period.’

I seriously wondered if he were mentally unhinged. ‘But that’s impossible!’ I said with an awkward little laugh.

He gave me a scornful look. ‘Nothing’s impossible to Dinah Slade.’

I suddenly realized not only that he was serious but that he was sane. I felt as if I were in an elevator which had dropped ten floors in two seconds.

‘But women
don’t become investment bankers,’ I stammered. ‘I mean, it just doesn’t happen. It can’t happen. The clients—’

‘Oh sure,’ he said sarcastically, ‘sure. Cosmetics is for women and queens and banking’s for men, we all know that. But I took that woman to Paris and she had my potential clients eating out of her hand and she’s so damned smart and she’s so damned charming and she makes money as easily as other women darn socks. If she ever got a toehold in Milk Street she’d have all Lombard Street in her change-purse in less time than it takes to change the guard at Buckingham Palace.’

I was appalled. ‘You mean she’s just like a man!’

He gave me a pitying look. A second later his eyes shone with a dozen erotic memories before clouding with pain. ‘Some man!’ he muttered fiercely, blinking back his tears.

It was a truly horrifying sight to see a man like Steve Sullivan reduced to pulp by a woman. Groping for words I could only blurt out: ‘But how could you and Paul have found her so attractive?’

‘Because she’s a
woman
!’ he shouted. ‘Because she’s the sexiest woman in the whole damn world!’ He had to stop to control himself before he was able to add with contempt: ‘You poor little kid, you’ll never understand.’

I really couldn’t let that pass. ‘I understand I like my women to be women,’ I whipped back at him, ‘and not second-rate men.’

He blinked. I knew he had always thought I was incapable of an erection. At last he said: ‘Do you have someone special in mind?’

‘Vivienne Coleman. You know her?’

‘Jay’s niece by marriage? The brunette with the thick wavy hair and the Ziegfeld-Follies legs and the greatest tits in town?’

‘Uh-huh.’

There was a pause. Then: ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I know her.’ When he looked at me again I knew I had travelled up at least six notches in his estimation. He took another pull at his hip-flask before he realized it was empty. ‘Well, let me tell you,’ he said incisively, twisting the cap back, ‘you’re a smart boy. You just stick to that straightforward kind of woman and never get mixed up with a complicated masterpiece like Dinah Slade. And let me tell you something else. The next woman I get involved with is going to be the absolute opposite of Dinah. She’s going to be pure, beautiful, quiet, sensitive – and with no ambition other than to be a perfect wife and mother at all times.’

We had reached his home. The car was surging up the driveway, and as we both gazed absent-mindedly at the house the front door opened and my sister Emily walked out on to the porch to meet us.

[1]

In
fairness to myself I must stress that I did at first make great efforts to prevent the inevitable. Within minutes of our arrival I had cornered Emily and informed her firmly that I wanted to take her back to Manhattan at once.

‘Cornelius, you can’t be serious!’ She looked astonished but, since she was no fool, embarrassed as well. ‘I couldn’t leave the children – they’ve come to depend on me and I must at least wait till a new nurse is hired. Also there’s still no housekeeper and the servants require supervision.’

‘Emily,’ I said, ‘I’m not leaving you unchaperoned beneath the same roof as Steve Sullivan.’

‘Oh, don’t be so absurd, Cornelius! This is 1929, not 1860! Besides, I can’t help feeling your attitude is insulting to me. Do you really have such a low opinion of my morals? And do you really think I’m as downright idiotic as some pusillanimous Victorian heroine? I’m more than capable of locking my bedroom door at night, I promise you!’ she added, giving me a radiant smile.

I gave up. I knew it would be useless to protest further, but I spent the entire journey home wondering how I could possibly explain the situation to my mother. In the end I could only hope that since no explanation was possible my mother would never find out.

However, Steve spent few nights at home at first. He was too busy working late as he excavated the sorry history of Van Zale Participations, and instead of travelling home each night to Long Island he was obliged to catch what sleep he could in the City. His brothers were dragged up from the New Jersey shore; I could imagine him seizing them by the scruffs of their necks, shaking them till their teeth rattled and bawling obscenities at them until they broke down and wept. When he had extracted every detail of their débâcle he bought them one-way tickets to Australia and personally escorted them aboard the ship which was to take them through the Panama Canal and west across the Pacific. Knowing how sentimental Steve was about his brothers we were all impressed by this tough treatment, and Lewis even remarked that there might be some hope for the twins now that Steve had stopped spoon-feeding them and forced them to stand on their own feet. But our hearts sank at the thought that the mess was so bad at the Trust that Steve felt he had no alternative but to sever the fraternal apron-strings.

I was still wondering how Steve planned to sweep the mess under the rug when I received a call from Lewis asking me to attend a meeting with Steve in his office.

I knew what that meant. When I arrived promptly at two o’clock on that November afternoon Sam was a pace behind me.

‘Once more on to the high wire, partner!’ he hissed in my ear as I wiped the sweat from the palms of my hands and rapped smartly on the door.

Lewis and
Steve were very displeased to see Sam and tried to get rid of him.

‘This is purely a partners’ consultation, Cornelius,’ said Lewis stuffily.

I doubted it. The meeting had all the marks of a power struggle from which the other partners had been carefully excluded, and I had no intention of riding out alone to do battle with Steven Sullivan.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘but if this meeting concerns Van Zale Participations I want Sam to take notes so that I can review the situation thoroughly afterwards.’

They both knew that meant I wanted Sam to be a witness.

Lewis cleared his throat. ‘I assure you, my dear Cornelius—’

‘Forget it, Lewis,’ interrupted Steve, who for all his faults had the virtue of never being pompous. ‘All right, boys, sit down. Cigarette, either of you?’

We declined cigarettes. We declined the offer of a drink. We sat down on the couch, I with my hands lying limply on my thighs, Sam with his pen poised above the pad of paper on his knees.

Lewis shifted uneasily in his chair and started to make a long boring elaborate speech about the honour of the firm and the illustrious name Van Zale. Sam wrote neatly on his pad but after a while he stopped writing in English and amused himself by translating Lewis into German. Finally he scrawled: ‘What a lot of crap Lewis talks!’ and began to write down the lyrics of ‘Old Man River’.

Suddenly Steve interrupted. Sam’s pen skidded across the paper and scribbled busily back and forth.

‘We plan on discussing Van Zale Participations at the partners’ meeting tomorrow,’ Steve was saying abruptly, ‘but we wanted to talk it over with you now, Cornelius, because you’re very much concerned in the plan I’ve worked out over the last few days. Let me begin by summarizing the details so that we can all understand exactly what was going on.’

Sam wrote DETAILS and underlined it.

‘As you know, the money received from the sale of the new issue in Van Zale Participations was collected by Luke and reinvested in the market in the corporations which formed the Trust’s portfolio. There was necessarily a lag in time between the receipt of the money and its investment, and Luke fell into the habit of lengthening that gap until at one time there was a sum of six hundred thousand dollars held on deposit at the bank and waiting to be invested. There was nothing wrong with this; in fact it could be argued that Luke was conscientiously taking his time about deciding where he could best put the money. Unfortunately he arrived at the wrong answer which was: into his own pocket.’